Digital Cable Tv Offers Whole New World Of Cheese

October 3, 2004|By Chauncey Mabe Books Editor

A few years ago I wrote a column that, technically speaking, might have gotten me chased from the ranks of book editors in a hail of stones.

In it, I revealed my love for television, and not for the high-toned literary kind of television a book reviewer might be expected to like -- Masterpiece Theatre, the miniseries of Richard Halmi, or Brian Lamb's soon-to-be-defunct Booknotes program. Indeed, despite my professional interest, as well as a lifelong love of books and reading, I've never been able to watch more than a few moments of Mr. Lamb's show before I get the itching thought that I could be watching real television.

And that was before I got digital cable.

Wowser. All the regular 60 or so basic channels, plus ESPNews, ESPN Classic, BBC America, plus several varieties of MTV and VH1, eight HBO channels, eight Showtime channels, several versions of Discovery, a slew of solo movie channels (Encore, Aventure, True, Love), and two Sundance channels. There may be others; digital cable TV is kind of like the Bible, with vast expanses of material I'm certain nobody ever looks at.

What a trove of mindless trash television it is! By "trash television" I do not mean reality TV; in a tiny remnant of television snobbery, I don't watch reality shows. I turn to television to escape reality, not to wallow in it, and while I'm not so naive as to think there is much of anything real in "reality television," my interest and allegiance lies primarily with scripted dramas. So I disdain all those new home improvement, science and true crime channels. Sure, I catch the occasional documentary. While riding out Hurricane Frances at a friend's house, I watched a series of shows about the ancient Egyptians on one of the Discovery channels that had such astonishing production values it might have been put together by Peter Jackson.

But mostly the expanded variety offered by digital cable has given me entre into new realms of escapist cheese. All those movie channels have to be filled up with some kind of programming, and I've discovered "stars" and movies -- often with multiple sequels! -- I had never even heard of before. The action-adventure movies of martial arts champions Cynthia Rothrock, for example, or Don "The Dragon" Wilson, are apparently numberless, with titles like China O'Brien, Bloodfist VI (!), and Tiger Claws. Who knew?

Also, who knew that Lou Diamond Phillips, an actor with many respectable credits, has a secret life as a direct-to-video action star? Or that Richard Grieco, the otherwise forgotten actor best remembered for starring alongside Johnny Depp in the '80s TV show 21 Jump Street, has enjoyed a long and busy career in tacky, little-seen crime and sci-fi pictures?

Usually it's impossible to tell if these movies are made for Showtime, USA-TV, the Sci Fi Channel or some direct-to-video company. Often they're rip-offs of some more competent mainstream film, with endless variations on Alien, or Outbreak, or Blade Runner or Enter the Dragon. The interesting thing about these movies is how predictably bad they are; I'm not talking about diamonds in the rough, flawed efforts by talented younger filmmakers, or major productions that failed in the theaters -- although you can find those, too, like the near-miss crime drama Confidence (2003), starring Edward Burns, Dustin Hoffman and Rachel Weisz; or Little City (1997), with Josh Charles, Penelope Ann Miller and Jo Beth Williams, a charming if talky romantic comedy.

No, I'm talking about hordes of bad crime and sci-fi films, sometimes with a little soft-core action inserted in a futile attempt to divert attention from the general cinematic ineptitude. They're awful -- and to the right viewer in the right mood, they're irresistible. They're the pulp fiction magazines of the new millennium, seeming to exist in a parallel universe of which I had no conception before a few months ago.

Back in the day before the day, people my age used to take hallucinogenic substances to see the kinds of things I can now see nightly on TV. Groovy, man. With digital cable, who needs drugs?